Google Health To Be Shuttered On January 1, 2012

Google Health, the company’s attempt to improve health care by letting consumers move medical data online and control who can access it, is shutting down. The service will be retired on January 1, 2012.

In a blog post announcing the news, Google says the product didn’t catch on as it had hoped:

Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.

User data stored in Google Health will remain available for download for an extra year, until January 1, 2013. There are a number of different download options detailed in Google’s blog post. Any any data not downloaded after January 1, 2013 will be permanently deleted, Google says.

Google Health launched in early 2008. As we wrote at the time, there was obvious value in what Google Health offered, but legitimate questions about whether the end user would go through the “heavy lifting” required to extract that value. Today’s decision seems to confirm that not enough users were willing to do that.

Google’s announcement today also says that PowerMeter, a somewhat similar tool that allowed users to put data about personal energy consumption online, is shutting down later this year. It’ll be available until September 16, 2011.

About The Author

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.